The Effects of Finger-Walking in Place (FWIP) on Spatial Knowledge Acquisition in Virtual Environments

Spatial knowledge, necessary for efficient navigation, comprises route knowledge (memory of landmarks along a route) and survey knowledge (overall representation like a map). Virtual environments (VEs) have been suggested as a power tool for understanding some issues associated with human navigation, such as spatial knowledge acquisition. The Finger-Walking-in-Place (FWIP) interaction technique is a locomotion technique for navigation tasks in immersive virtual environments (IVEs). The FWIP was designed to map a human’s embodied ability overlearned by natural walking for navigation, to finger-based interaction technique. Its implementation on Lemur and iPhone/iPod Touch devices was evaluated in our previous studies. In this paper, we present a comparative study of the joystick’s flying technique versus the FWIP. Our experiment results show that the FWIP results in better performance than the joystick’s flying for route knowledge acquisition in our maze navigation tasks.